Monday or Tuesday

From Goodreads

Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories

I'm still not a huge fan of modernist literature; but, I prefer Woolf to Joyce immensely. Now, I've only hitherto read a very short collection of stories by her, so I may find her longer works as equally uninspiring as Ulysses or Portrait. But Woolf makes the mundane minutia less boring than Joyce.

Of the eight stories I found, "A Society" and, "The Mark on the Wall" the most compelling. Her darker humor in lambasting a chauvinist culture in "A Society" is reminiscent of A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift (without the messiness of cannibalism). The interesting epistemic notions in "The Mark on the Wall" are intriguing and the comic irony in the ending is good. Honestly, that might be my favorite stream of consciousness work that I've read so fa.

Ulysses - the Spark Notes

(Originally written February 21, 2018)

From my Goodreads review:

Ok, so the Spark Notes gets three stars and the novel only gets two? What gives?

Honestly, Ulysses was not that enjoyable. Some of that, a lot of that, lack of enjoyment stemmed from how difficult it was for me to follow. This little guide made a lot more of Joyce intelligible to me. I'm not saying that I would have loved Ulysses had I read the Spark Notes first, only that I have a deeper understanding and thus, appreciation for it now. My plan was to read another interpretation of this book and then Dubliners by Joyce but I feel I need a break. I'll try and get back to Joyce quickly though, while it's still somewhat fresh in my mind.

I'm just not that into James Joyce

(Originally written February 14, 2018)

My Goodreads review:

I'm just not that into James Joyce. There is a ton of brilliant stuff in the book and the variety of genres within the book is interesting. But, like with my review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I found I was often bored in reading it. There's some pretty funny stuff in it like the scene that mirrors Odysseus escaping from the Cyclops. However, it's mostly just the thought processes of the main characters with not much going on. For me, reading James Joyce is like watching figure skating. I can appreciate the beauty and technical skill that goes into it, but while it's impressive I'm probably going to change the channel relatively quickly because I'm just not that into it...

Two verses from Acts 3

I've been rather neglectful of a number of things in my life recently. I've been intellectually, spiritually, physically and creatively lazy over the past few months. This is nothing new - and it tends to coincide with dips in form in my struggles. This in turn creates tension in my marriage, putting more pressure on my inability to overcome my baser desires and intentional forgetfulness. That in turn, makes me a bit depressed and I turn to my well worn stress relievers putting more tension on my marriage and the carousel continues to spin faster and faster, sucking me in deeper and deeper to the middle and everything seems to get worse and worse. And so on and so on. But, if I push through and am not intellectually, physically, creatively or most importantly, spiritually lazy than none of this happens. Mistakes are still made, but these are incidents rather than cycles.

I often work in platitudes or hastily announced, unachievable goals. This drives my wife insane and sets me up for failure. I'm trying not to do this again. I've ran or worked out the last three days, finished another book (40 of my 60 goal this year) and read some from Acts last night. I'm hoping to just make incremental progress this week and work on creating a more virtuous circle rather than getting sucked into the aforementioned negative merry-go-round. But - as you can see, that last sentence is rather close to a hastily announced, unachievable goal. Is it my own personal jargon? Who am I announcing these platitudes towards? I think I'm only saying them to ease my own unrest. But, I digress.

I read the first three chapters of Acts last night after finishing The Symposium by Plato and reading 20 pages of Ulysses by Joyce. It took me nearly a month to finish the Plato piece (which marks my intellectual laziness as of late). It will take me longer to finish Joyce (which is because it's a gargantuan 700 plus pages and difficult to read). But, two verses stood out to me from Acts 3.

Acts 3:16

"It is Jesus' name and the faith that comes through him that has given this complete healing to him".

I'm not sure that I'm ready or willing to call my self-inflicted frustrations a disease. It's more of an issue of will. But, there is definitely some healing that needs to take place in me. Whether it is biological or spiritual in nature is a question of semantics. There is something broken inside of me. And it struck me that my spiritual laziness is leading me to reject complete healing. What also struck me about this verse is that faith comes through Jesus. In order for man to have faith it must come through Jesus. It isn't a strength of a man reaching out to Jesus, but rather Jesus preceding the faith that the man can have. So I prayed for that faith that comes only through Jesus last night and I echo that prayer again today.

Acts 3:26

"When God raised up His servant, He sent him first to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways".

My struggles are my struggles. They have impacted my social life, my career life, my physical life to an extent, my spiritual life and my love life. To be blunt, they have sucked. Yet, I derive a weird pleasure while going through them. I know it's wrong but I do it anyway for the moments of escape they provide. However, this verse jumped out at me because I never thought of getting out of these struggles as a blessing. I just figured when I grew out of this struggle that I could return to a sort of base line normalcy. I now see it - when I am turned by Jesus from my wicked way, I won't be returning to some base line normalcy, but an elevated state of being blessed.

Odysseus: A Life

From my Goodreads review...

It feels somewhat wrong to give the same number of stars to this book as The Iliad and The Odyssey; however, I've done just that because Charles Rowan Beye has made Odysseus extremely accessible without this book being overly scholarly, and thus, overly dry. The style of the work is good and reconstructs Odysseus' life and times that a neophyte Greek historian like myself can digest. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to understand either of Homer's works a little more clearly.

I had just finished up the aforementioned books before getting into this one and it was very good to get a recap at the end. I only wish I had read the Aeneid prior, but chest la vie? Now it's on to Ulysses (and if my previous encounter with Joyce is a harbinger of things to come, a commentary on that as well).

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

Oh boy. What a grind it was to finish this one. First of all, there is no denying that this is truly a phenomenal book with incredible insights and Joyce does an amazing job of putting you into the story as a fly on the wall who can use every sense to imagine being in the story. We see, hear, feel, taste and smell alongside Stephen Dedalus. Secondly, I find much of Stephen Dedalus to be extremely boring. That may be sacrilegious, but I fear and fear not the repercussions of that sentence.

After I finished the book I did some reading and found that Joyce had originally submitted this as a treaty on Aesthetics. I found his take on aesthetics to be interesting. "-Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end" (Joyce, 207). In fact, Stephen's entire conversation with Lynch about art, aesthetics and beauty is fascinating. His contention that beauty should create a stasis between pity and terror rather than a kinetic emotion is an interesting and dispassionate notion. I think it is wrong, but it is at the very least thought provoking. His take on false art producing kinetic emotions like desire and loathing is something to take into account. Sadly, his attempt to get his thoughts on aesthetics was unpublished and he housed it in this semi-autobiographical tale that had more boring parts than interesting ones. I guess he accomplished his goal and left me in sort of a stasis, offering few kinetic emotions about his book. 

One of the few times I felt kinetic emotion was during the retreat section when the priests were calling for repentance so that no soul would suffer eternal damnation. In my mind's eye I recalled terrifying sermons from the retired senior pastor who gave such terrifying images of hellfire and brimstone I prayed nightly to escape such a fate. Tears and stress overtook me overtime he preached this message and I can't imagine hell much scarier than as he put it. I empathized with Stephen as he struggled with repenting and the notion that he had done to much to escape this terrible fate. "What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction?" (Joyce, 103-104). I understand that line on a visceral level. I also understand his wrestling with faith throughout the book, though I find my ending point to be vastly different than that of Stephen's. 

I found that like Daumal in A Night of Serious Drinking Joyce also sends a jab to the nose of reason. While Daumal called reason the off-loading of the responsibility to think, Joyce calls reason a pollutant. "A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then there flew hither and tither shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and seasons because they, unlike man are in the order of their life and have not perverted that order by reason" (Joyce, 224-225).

Joyce unleashes a stinging attack on Protestantism in the back end of the book. Much of this book houses an Irish history that I don't fully know and can't fully know. It concerns self-rule and the religious trappings of a Protestant-Catholic war that has obvious political overtones. But, I do, even as someone who isn't Catholic understand his criticism of the disorganized way in which protestantism worships and structures there fragmented theological opinions. "I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" (Joyce, 243-244). I don't agree that faith is necessarily an absurdity nor do I find Protestantism illogical. But, I do find and struggle with the fact that Protestantism is so incoherent and crave some of the symmetry and logically soundness behind Catholicism. 

Lastly, I found this line to be sadly beautiful in its composition and meaning. "The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future" (Joyce, 251). I find that restlessness and striving to be endearing, but also wearying.